


motions of time

by skuls



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc, Episode AU: s04e14 Memento Mori, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-19 04:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8190320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skuls/pseuds/skuls
Summary: He kisses her in the hallway of the hospital under the washed out lights: quickly, with his hands in her hair.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Based off the tumblr prompts 20. “You look like you’re about to cry. What’s happened?” and 21. “I’m scared.” original post: http://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/151167398498/omg-i-love-your-writing-msr-20-andor-21

**i.**

He kisses her in the hallway of the hospital under the washed out lights: quickly, with his hands in her hair. The imprint of his breath is still on her forehead, and she shivers as she kisses him back. _This is right,_ she thinks, even as she walks away. 

_I can’t do this to him,_ she thinks.

**ii.**

They taught her about cancer in medical school. Scully can still see the definitions in the margins of the crisp white textbook pages, hear the sounds of the hospital she did her residency in. She’s worked with cancer patients before. A friend of her mother’s suffered from it. It’s the kind of thing that you never imagine happening to you.

She is a doctor. She knows how this will end.

She lets her mother drive her home, lets her tuck her under blankets on the couch because she is her only daughter now, and it’s all her own fault. Not Mulder’s. He never asked her to come, she just followed. I wouldn’t change a day, she’d said. And she wouldn’t. But she hates to hear her mother cry through the bathroom door.

After her mother leaves, it’s too quiet in the apartment. Scully can’t get warm. She turns up the heat, and piles two more blankets on the couch. _I am not going to be an invalid,_ she tells herself sternly. _I am going back to work. I’m going to fight this._ She thinks about calling Mulder, but she has no good excuse for him to come over. She wishes her dog wasn’t dead so he could keep her feet warm.

Bill calls. Scully waits for her little brother to call, but he doesn’t and she pretends it doesn’t sting. She really wants to talk to Melissa - and realizes that she might get to sooner than she’d really like.

_You are dying,_ she tells herself. Clinical voice. She can do this.

There is nothing clinical about it. She really doesn’t want to die.

**iii.**

He starts to dream about her again, and not the good kind. The fathomless dreams that leave him gasping and sweaty and mouthing her name, one hand reaching for the phone. He dreams about her at the end of a long, dark hallway, and no matter how hard he runs, he cannot get to her. _You can’t save her_ , is what he tells himself.

She pretends she is strong, and he pretends she isn’t dying. It’s not hard, until she has a nosebleed, or he notices that she’s lost weight, or she gets too tired and has to sit down. He wants to wrap his arms around her, as if he could protect her from fucking cancer, as if it’s not killing her from the inside out.

He thinks about kissing her again more often then he should under the circumstances. He’s wanted to kiss her for a while now, but he always assumed they had time. And she always came back every time something tried to kill her. But this, this… He wants to kiss her again, should kiss her again. But he doesn’t. If anyone wants to know why, it’s because Skinner’s been dropping by the office to check in. How are you doing, Agent Scully. She always bristles after any well-wishers, and he knows she is tired of being asked how she is doing so he never does, although he wants to. He can usually tell by the slump of her shoulders.

After Tom Colton (where did he crawl out from?) leaves one day, Scully stops in the doorway, leans heavily against the jamb. “Why do they care so much about me but not about you?” she says, and her head’s ducked down so her hair creates a curtain, but her voice is thick, like she’s about to cry. “Everyone comes out of the goddamn woodwork for me, and I haven’t even spoken to most of these people in years.”

“Scully?” he asks. Does she actually feel bad that she’s getting sympathy? He’s never considered what the rest of the Bureau would think if he was dying. “You’re worth caring about.” She’s worth everything, really.

“You are, too,” she says fiercely. “I would care if it were you.”

“Scully,” he says again, and reaches out to take her hand.

“I’m fine,” she insists, yanking it away. He knows she is lying. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” She pushes out of the door, and leaves him to watch her go.

**iv.**

She doesn’t like to be alone. 

Which may or may not be an irrational statement, but why the hell should she die alone? She tries to see her mother every weekend, at least, and call her every couple of days to give an update. She writes her will on a Monday night, splitting her belongings between her mother, Bill, and Mulder. A few things to friends she’s barely seen in years. She bites her lip too hard and tastes the stingingly familiar copper twang. There isn’t much she actually has to leave to anyone. 

She thinks about not being alone, and she thinks about bringing Mulder home with her. It seems wrong that the best part of her day is in the dim light of their closet in the basement. It should be in her apartment, with the curtains thrown open and all the lamps turned on, but the office is the only time when she feels remotely normal. Whenever she’s alone, she’s left with her cacophonous, treacherous thoughts, and whenever she’s with other people, they give her pitying looks. Mulder gives her these looks, too, but only when he thinks she won’t notice. 

In bed, she replays their arguments over their latest case in her head, and smiles despite herself. She misses him a little too much at night. She keeps replaying the kiss in her head, too. 

He hasn’t mentioned it since then. It’s almost infuriating, this ongoing silence. The thing is that she wants to. She’s not sure how long she’s wanted to, but she wants to. But. She doesn’t want to leave him. It’s probably a flawed logic, but maybe if she holds him away, it will hurt less. 

She calls him at 3 am to hear his voice. 

**v.**

He wants to watch a movie with her. “You’ll like it, Scully, it’s a touching story about prison,” he says, waving a VHS of _Shawshank Redemption_.

“Really,” she says dryly, crossing her arms over her chest. She smiles up at him, and agrees because she’s dying and he’s worried and she’s still lonely at night. They settle in on her couch, with a blanket that he keeps shoving at her whenever she tries to share. 

“I don’t think he did it,” she says as soon as the trial is over with.

Mulder raises an eyebrow. “And what makes you say that?”

_It’s what you would believe_ , she thinks. “I just have a feeling, Mulder.”

“Well, I never would’ve expected it from you, Scully.” He smiles to show he is kidding.

The movie is good, but she has been more and more tired lately, slumping to the side on the couch and tugging the blanket around her. Before she knows it, she’s waking up to Mulder’s fingers in her hair and mutters of, “Scully, it’s over. Want to go to your bed?”

“Mmm, good here,” she mutters into the blanket.

“Okay,” he whispers, and she feels his fingers brush her hair back before his weight leaves the couch.

She grabs his jacket. “Wait,” she says. “Stay. Please.”

Mulder pauses. Her eyes are still closed, but she can picture him hovering above her, a hesitant or surprised (or some mixture of the two) look on his face. “Scully? Are you sure?”

“Please,” she whispers. 

She wakes up with his arm slung over her carelessly, somewhere it definitely wasn’t before they fell asleep. She smiles, kisses his hand without thinking. 

**vi.**

He wakes up draped in a blanket on a different couch, and Scully’s warm weight gone. For a minute, he’s illogically terrified, until he hears the coffee maker in her kitchen. He finds her with both hands wrapped around a steamy mug. She’s wearing socks, which seems slightly ridiculous for some reason. He’s never seen her in just socks.

“Coffee?” She hands him a mug from the cabinet. There is a smear of dried blood on her palm, and a red-splotched paper towel in the trash can.

“Thanks,” he says. They drink in silence. It’s too hot, and burns his tongue. He hides it by poking his cheek reflexively. 

Scully sets her white mug onto the counter, says, “Mulder” very official, like they’re in a meeting with Skinner. “I’ve been thinking about what happened in the hallway.”

Oh, God. His neck grows as hot as the coffee in his hands. He’s regretted doing that ever since the silence surrounding it grew thick. Not the action itself, but. It was the wrong time, wrong place, she doesn’t feel the same way…

Scully scuffs the tile with her left socked foot. “I don’t regret it.” 

Relief surges over him like the ocean. 

“And I think that I…” She stops, blinks. “It’s just that. I don’t want to hurt you more than I… I don’t want to make these promises, and then leave you here alone. You…” She blinks hard again, sniffs and looks at the ground.

He doesn’t tell her that it’s going to hurt either way, that her leaving will leave a giant hole in his life whether he kisses her a thousand times between now and then or not. He doesn’t tell her that he loves her.

Instead, he just kisses her. And she kisses him back. 

**vii.**

Her favorite part of the day has switched, to when the sky is dark and she’s pressed up against Mulder in bed. Much better than the basement office. They can really talk here. 

**viii.**

They don’t date, they’re just. Just. Just mulderandscully, just like always. (And why does his name always come first, she’s going to have to have a talk with him about that, a talk that will probably end with her kissing him against her kitchen counter.) 

(They do share hotel rooms now, though.)

**ix.**

He comes with her to her treatments now, and while she won’t let him hold her hand during, but she will let him hold her hand after, in the cab drive where no one will see. He hates to see her nose bleed, and he hates to see her grow sicker and sicker. It’s still this unfathomable horror of something he can’t save her from. It’s unfair, because he loves her and he thinks she might love him and they never deserved this macabre fairy tale they’ve been gifted with. _Whatever I’ve done, she doesn’t deserve this._

He loves her and he wouldn’t let himself admit for years. 

**x.**

“You look like you’re about to cry,” he mutters into her hair. “What’s happened?” It seems like a stupid question as soon as it leaves his mouth.

She rolls away, turning her face into the pillow so that he can’t hear her soft mutter, but he feels the words vibrate through them both. “I’m scared.”

“Oh, Scully,” he says softly, tugging her closer. There’s dried bloodstains on her too-white pillowcase, and fresh blood joining it.

“I don’t want to die, Mulder,” she says, and it’s the first time she’s cried, really cried, in front of him in a long time. “I don’t want to die.”

He kisses her forehead, and then her temple, hugging her hard. Like he can protect her from the cancer. “You’re not going to die, Scully,” he says. “I promise. I promise.”  


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> based off the askbox prompt "cancer arc cuddling" on tumblr. http://how-i-met-your-mulder.tumblr.com/post/153099406883/fic-prompt-cancer-arc-cuddling

**i.**

She wakes up when she’s bled all over his t-shirt.

Which might not be a huge deal if the sight of it didn’t terrify her so much. For a split second, she’s scared something’s happened to him, and reaches up to touch his face, his neck to feel for a pulse, and then she feels the slide of warm liquid out of her nostril. There’s blood on his shirt, her shirt, and all over the hotel pillows. She runs to the bathroom and stands hunched over the basin with a handful of scented Kleenex and cold water running, breathing slowly in an attempt to stave off vomiting. 

He taps on the other side of the door politely, but she can feel the worry coming off of him in waves. “Scully? Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and means for everything. Her fingers are curled in a death grip around the edge of the porcelain counter, and there’s red smeared along it now. 

Mulder opens the door. “It’s okay, Scully.” 

His hand is on the back of her neck, and he looks like a ghost, all pale and stricken with her blood on his t-shirt. “You’ve got blood all over you,” she says. 

“Are you okay?” he repeats, and she nods, a little helplessly. It’s all too tragic for them, blood stained and nearly crying in a hotel bathroom. She lets him pull her into a hug, head just below his chin, and tries not to sob at the pungent aroma of copper masking his usual scent.

She insists that he go change while she wipes the blood away. He’s gone and so are the pillows when she comes out, so she steals a shirt from his suitcase and crawls into bed and waits. 

He comes back with four new pillows and crawls in beside her. They move together immediately, arms wrapped around each other, her forehead against his chest. She wants to turn away in fear of bleeding again, but doesn’t want to let him go just yet. I don’t want to let him go just yet, she thinks, and tries not to think of dying.

**ii.**

She’s always exhausted after treatments. It’s a challenge not to just curl up in her car with the heater on and fall asleep at a stoplight. She drives to Mulder’s apartment, because she knows she’ll be able to sleep there. Her bed is always cold and lonely now, but the couch will be warm, even without him curled around her. 

He left town on a case yesterday: profiling, Skinner’s insistence. She couldn’t come along because of her treatment. He hadn’t wanted to go, hadn’t wanted to leave her alone. She wanted to be selfish and tell him not to, she’s nervous about him being out there without her for backup, what if something happens… But. She’d driven him to the airport, kissed him at the gate and told him to be careful. _You’re not allowed to die before me_ , she’d almost added, but then decided it wouldn’t be funny. She misses him more now, curling up in the corner of the couch with his print blanket pulled over her. 

She wakes up when he crawls in beside her, hanging halfway off of the couch because it’s too small. “Hey,” she mutters, moving closer so there is more room. “Thought you were on a case.”

He wraps both arms around her. “Missed you,” he says, and means, _I was worried you were going to die while I was gone._

 _I’m dying_ , she wants to remind him, but instead curls herself around him, her head against his shoulder and his fingers caught in her hair. “Missed you too,” she says, already falling back asleep, and pretending that everything is okay for a little longer. 

**iii.**

She wakes him to his soft sobs echoing off the walls of her hospital room, his head on her bed and hot tears trickling down into the cracks between her fingers. “Mulder?” she whispers hoarsely, reaching out to touch his hair.

He sniffs, turning his face into the mattress, clearly embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he whispers. “Go back to sleep.”

“No.” She’s sick and sleepy, but she reaches for his hand. “C’mere.”

“I’ll hurt you,” he says.

“No, you won’t.”

He slides into bed beside her, not quite touching her. She pulls his arm around her and leans back against his chest. “Mulder?” she whispers.

“Hmm?”

“I think the chip is working.”

 _You don’t know that_ , she expects him to say. Or, _I hope so_. Or _of course it is_ , an attempt to keep her hopeful, the way he’s done time and again, even if he doesn’t believe it.

He just holds her tighter. She squeezes his hand like it’s her lifeline, because it practically is. 


End file.
